POPIA privacy notice

The responsible party is 1st Group Capital (Pty) Ltd, trading as FFREEDOM, an authorised financial services provider with FSP licence number 49632, registered in the Republic of South Africa. We determine the purpose of, and means for, processing the personal information described in this notice.

Our Information Officer is registered with the Information Regulator and is accountable for compliance with POPIA across the publication, the advisory service and our marketing.

• Identity and contact details you give us: name, email address, telephone number and company.
• The content of any message, comment, enquiry or website issue report you submit.
• Advisory context you choose to share, such as goals, time horizon or the topics you want covered.
• Technical information: browser type, device category, referring page and a daily one-way hash used to deduplicate article views. We do not store raw IP addresses against your reading history.
• Email engagement events supplied by our sending provider, such as delivered, bounced or complained.

We do not knowingly collect special personal information as defined in section 26 of POPIA, and we do not collect information from children under 18 without the consent of a competent person.

We never sell your personal information. We share it only with operators who process it on our written instruction and under confidentiality obligations: our cloud hosting and database provider, our transactional email provider, and our analytics and advertising partners where you have accepted the relevant cookies.

Advisory enquiries are shared with accredited representatives of 1st Group Capital (Pty) Ltd so that they can contact you. We may disclose information where the law requires it, or to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

Some operators process information outside South Africa. Where that happens we rely on section 72 of POPIA and require a comparable level of protection by contract.

Access to personal information is restricted by role. Database access is enforced with row level security so that reader submissions can only be read by authorised staff. Traffic is encrypted in transit, secrets are stored in a managed vault, and administrative actions and system errors are logged for review.

If a security compromise affects your personal information, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as soon as reasonably possible in terms of section 22 of POPIA.

• Ask what personal information we hold about you and receive a copy of it.
• Ask us to correct, complete or update information that is inaccurate or out of date.
• Ask us to delete or destroy information we no longer have grounds to keep.
• Object, on reasonable grounds, to the processing of your personal information.
• Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing already carried out.
• Lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa.

To exercise any of these rights, send a request through our contact page and mark it “POPIA request”. We may ask for proof of identity before acting, and we will respond within a reasonable period. Formal requests may be made on Form 2 prescribed under POPIA.

Essential cookies keep the site working and remember your cookie choice. Analytics and advertising cookies are only loaded after you accept them in the consent banner, and you can change your mind at any time by clearing the site data in your browser.

Reading analytics are aggregated. A visitor is counted once per article per day using a salted, non-reversible hash that is not linked to your identity.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your information, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa), JD House, 27 Stiemens Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, or by email to the Regulator’s POPIA complaints address published on inforegulator.org.za.

Complaints about financial advice may also be directed to the FAIS Ombud. FFREEDOM publishes general financial education and does not provide personal financial advice on this website.